Compulsory Education

This essay details how the narrator of Charlotte Brontë's Villette, Lucy Snowe, crafts her narrative by relying on the structure of obsession's pathology while not falling victim to its symptoms. In this way, Lucy not only finds her authorial voice, but also offers an alternative treatment for obsession, one in which the obsessed person need not renounce the compulsion to obsess (which may be impossible), but instead encourages her to express that obsession in a more culturally and personally productive fashion.